The question set is (whether deliberately or unavoidably) too wide or moot to
be `covered' in the time. For your own sake you must decide -- i. e. discover
as you go along -- which aspect you will focus on, and for the reader's sake
you must indicate (without getting involved in) the nearest of the territories
you won't be getting into. This sort of skill is far more creditable than any
memory-dump, however compendious. It might even be more creditable than the right answer.

It's not an easy line, trying neither to be thought an ignoramus nor to treat
your reader as one. Some things are too elementary to be worth saying at all;
others, though as elementary, really ought to be said, but only if it can be
done lightly, incidentally, allusively.

Exposition and Criticism are just two of the strands that have to be
interwoven. If you remind readers, now and again, and unobtrusively, which
strand they're on they will be grateful. Even road-traffic needs not only
signposts before the turn-off but little reassurers after it.

What direct exposition fails to achieve will not be made good by a double dose
of the same; but only by indirectness, the light shed incidentally in the
course of (apparently) conversing about something else.

If you have summarized a controversy without servile literalness and with a due sense that the loser's errors are likely to be more creditable to him than your refutation is to you, it matters not at all whether you conclude for the
`right' side. Nor is there any requirement to conclude at all costs. A hung
jury shouldn't pretend not to be (and in any case the pretence is transparent).
On the other hand, since less is at stake than at the Old Bailey, a verdict can
be tried for size, in the language of trying-for-size, and with the best
supporting case you can make out.

Are there not models, to convey by example what cannot be conveyed by precept
or correction? But in all the weary years of essay-setting I have never known
a colleague show to the class specimens of a range of answers to the same
question. It's unthinkable. But whereof one cannot think, thereof one must
practise thinking.

Exactness

"Synonymy is suspect because no two terms have exactly the same meaning."
What is it that hangs on the existence ofexact synonymy which would not be near-enough satisfied with near-enough synonymy ?
We all need to talk about înear-enough X╣, and always call it îX╣ for short, calculating that the dangers of doing so, though obvious enough, are outweighed by the benefits.
Can there be any point in considering whether two terms have exactly the same fuzzinesses ?

Examining

Some exam questions seem to be looking for standard commentaries on standard issues, some for non-standard commentaries on standard issues, and a few for the detection of non-standard issues. This variety would be a little less unbearable if it were freely acknowledged.

Few of the many teachers engaged in examining think half as hard about the
problems of examining as they do about their own research. Few have carried
such reflections as they have had to the point of writing them down, whether
for their own clarification or to invite criticism from colleagues; fewer
still, to the point of publication, which invites criticism at large. And
every June they reproach themselves for not having done any of these things.

Rubric (Arts): If anything in the following passage intrigues you, talk about
it in the way and at the length that seems appropriate. (This is almost the
same as a blank rubric, but not quite.)

Some examiners accept that it is the examinee's right to read the rubric as
uncooperatively as a computer might. Rather fewer enjoy attempts to jolt the
student out of routine sullenness by high-voltage ingenuity.

Aristotle: "Clearly the art of examining does not consist in knowledge of any
definite subject."

Augustus de Morgan: "Only yesterday a friend told me that while walking in the street, violent and frightful screams startled her, and on enquiring at the house from whence they came, she was told that a young lady was dangerously ill of brain fever, having just passed a College examination."

R. F. Harrod: "What was this Greats? If in this centre, an arsenal of British thought, there could be such inspissated parochialism and complacency, were we not indeed in a rather parlous position? I frankly view the tendency of the dons to encroach upon the life and time and energy of the undergraduates with suspicion."

Examples

Aldrich is critical of the sterilized but idle examples so common in the
philosophical literature; but his own are just as far from being
case-histories. The trouble with `neutral' examples is that they are not as
neutral as they look. Their vocabulary shows an undue proportion of well-worn
low-tech items like tables and chairs, set in that most serene of environments,
the professor's study. Such examples are like fourth-form lab-experiments:
they are guaranteed to demonstrate exactly what the teacher wanted, provided he does the demonstrating himself.

But where the difference between asserting and denying is a real-life
controversy the vocabulary is of a more protean kind; the range of meanings in
one's own use, to say nothing of one's interlocutor's, cannot be relied on to
correspond neatly with the range of words. If anything, it is rather more
likely that all the positions worth defending will fall within the range of
permissible meanings of a single key word. The controversy amounts to a war to decide what that word is to mean from now on. Rarely is the victory clear-cut (and never as the result of any single battle). Even more rarely is the
contest recorded by the lexicographers.

Can a mere proposition-sentence ever count as an example? Yes; in privileged
cases, with a serious attempt to reconstruct just the circumstances its
utterance was intended to alter, and the motives for doing so, and the reasons
for concealing some of that intention and most of those motives, and the tone
which puts the best apples on top. In short, when it ceases to be a mere
proposition-sentence.

Everything depends on how the example or case-history is introduced. `Once
upon a time...' contrives to convey strong overall reassurance while
disclaiming all guarantees. This (it seems to say) will be intriguing, and
perhaps rewarding, in proportion as you let your imagination off the leash. No
need for it to be shackled by anxiety: no-one can be hurt in the world of
Let's-pretend, a.k.a. Hypothesis-land.

If the introduction-slot is empty, the default reading seems to be:
Nowhere-&-nowhen-in-particular, and a voice trying to sound disembodied.
Now why would any voice try to do that? That puzzle alone raises anxieties
enough to shackle the imagination.

Exegesis

The Apostle teaches (a text), and the Fathers also teach what the
same text means. Can this be the same verb?

There's an embarrassment inherent in the interpreter's position. The commented text is of higher status than the commenting text. Nevertheless the latter implies, what the former omitted, that high-status texts cannot manage without lower-status ones.

Something must be done to stop the second of the above uses of the verb from
being mistaken for something very like the first, or as the route to it, or
as that which isn't supposed to need still-lower-status interpretations. This
last use seems to declare an end to the process it has itself begun -- like
those who are broad-minded about all changes in the language up to the time of
their own O-levels.

What if it should turn out that the Apostolic text were itself at second
hand?

We exegetes serve a narrow bracket: those who can't manage the books
without our help, but can manage us without anyone's help. We can't get away
with just re-expounding, because it's unbecoming to set up as a better
expositor than, say, Hume or Mill; and because it generally turns out that we
are not in fact expounding a giant who will survive our explanation of him, but
some intermediate interpreter of intermediate eminence; and because to imply
that there are n standard interpretations to be memorised is exactly as
reprehensible as implying that there is only one. To accept any of a range of
answers is fine; but not if in doing so we imply that the questions raised by
the text are conveniently few, all uncontroversially known.

Exercises

There is inevitably something odd about the Exercise. It has to stand in some
defensible relation (neither too like nor too unlike) both to the Exposition
which preceded it and to the Examination which will follow it. It must be
accessible to all but the dimmest, and at the same time stimulating even to the
brightest. Its rubric seeks to be pellucid, but problematic. And it should try
not to bore the marker.

Most exercises are (and any could become) quite highly stylized; to that extent
they are exercises in not putting a foot wrong. They allow radical
misapprehensions to survive unguessed-at. Or is that their function? for
radical misapprehension casts aspersion on both the misapprehender and the
misapprehendee.

The good teacher is half expert, half Svengali. He knows, under those
respective hats, (i) his stuff, and (ii) how to make it someone else's. The
devices available to him are the Exposition and the Exercise. In practice the
proportion of Exposition to Exercise may vary from zero to infinity; and the
relation between them, where they both exist, also varies widely. In general,
Arts courses do not aim at a close relation; and in the common case where
Exposition is all lectures and Exercise is all essays, the absence of any
statable relation is counted a merit. Such zero relationship is guaranteed, in
many university-level language courses, by having no Exposition for the
Exercise to relate to. After all, we can all think of some things that are
learnt without Exposition, or without Exercise, or without either.

Overstating the merits of new exercise-types, and the demerits of old ones,
keeps the educational world turning. After all, if we innovators understand
our own proposals, it can only be in a programmatic, pre-experiential sense;
the principles they exemplify may not be quite so unmistakable, so undeniable,
so timeless as we implied. Multiplication tables, or prose translation (or any
other bugbear) was an innovation once, promising more than it achieved, but
achieving something. We had better concede that in some teachers' hands old
exercise-formats go on achieving results long after you and I have exposed
their radical unfairness, or unclarity, or dreariness; and of course even
unfair exercises can be used instructively by students not concerned to get
away with the minimum. Would-be stimulating exercises can always be tackled as if they were humdrum, and vice versa.

The exercise fulfils its function when it produces something beyond comparison more interesting than an exam answer: -- core-samples from prospecting in the library. Those who have caught that bug, on however small a scale, need no further convincing that the process is worthwhile. They now have a reason for writing; which is to say, they meet at least the first condition of writing something worth reading.

The purpose of an assignment isn't just to show you remember what teacher said. It is to randomize things so that, in addition to indicating how much has been retained on some point, the student incidentally reveals unsuspected
misapprehensions. So all assignments are traps, of a kind where the hunter
doesn't know what he is trapping for, and where it is in the prey's interest to
trip as many wires as possible. This is the only way for student and lecturer
to understand what each has failed to understand. Half the teacher's purposes
in setting an assignment are discovered after the event.

Exercise:

A data-set (some personally collected) +

at least two competing analyses of it, of nearly equal plausibility +

a criticism of the fit between each analysis and the set +

a criticism of the shortcomings of the set itself, and its mode of
collection.

Can questions on a text be, in principle, simultaneously unambiguous,
clear, fair, and challenging? The possibility of having to cross the line
from `On the whole Yes' to `On the whole No' is one I no longer find
unthinkable.

Exercise, Arts

In any of its eccentrically-named forms (Essay, Prose, Translation) the Arts
Exercise combines two major advantages: it is simple to set; and there is no
point in expecting benefit from anything less than a long-term treatment -- to
be measured in years. The combination gives a foolproof and wearproof solution to the organizational part of the teacher's problem (What the hell to set for next week's work), though leaving untouched the intellectual part of his
problem (What the hell to say about last week's work). With such a course one
has no difficulty in dashing off the syllabus, or in resisting colleagues'
raids on all that lovely time.

Expectations

Epictetus: "Do I go to my teacher as to the oracle, prepared to obey, or do I
too, like a snivelling child, go to university to learn nothing but the history
of philosophy and to understand books I didn't understand before, and, if given
the chance, to explain them to others ?

Man, you have had a fight with your slave at home, and turned the house upside
down and disturbed the neighbours, and turn up at my class with a knowing air
and sit there poking holes in my my explanations and complaining about the
teacher. You have come in a spirit of envy, depressed because the parcels from
home have stopped coming; and while the discussion is going on you sit there
worrying about domestic matters and wondering what people are saying about you back home. `They think I'm doing well, and expect me to come back knowing
everything there is to know! I suppose I was eager to learn, once, but it's
such hard work, and nobody sends me anything, and the baths at Nicopolis are a
dead loss, and you should just see my digs, and I'm not getting anything out of
the course.'

People say, `No-one gets any good from the lecture-room.' But which of you come with the expectation of being cured ? -- of having their judgment
improved? of working towards an understanding of what their real needs are?
Why then are you surprised if you take away only the qualities you brought with
you? For you do not come prepared to lay your present qualities aside, or of
correcting them, or of getting others in exchange. Far from it. Ask
yourselves whether you get what you came for. You came hoping to learn how to chatter about principles; that at least you are now fluent at. Doesn't the
course give you enough opportunity for displaying your precious principles?
Can you not hold forth for hours on the Liar paradox and on contrary-to-fact
conditionals? Why then do you complain, when you are getting what you came for ?"

Experience, lessons of

All this supposes I know what worked for me -- itself a far from
convincing claim, because so gratifying if true. It's more likely that what
worked for me can't be reconstructed: we survive on mythoepic versions. All
that varies -- but it's enough for useful disagreement -- is the degree of
complacency with which each of us contemplates his own idealization.

So the best exposition would be an edited replay of what seemed to work for me, eventually -- massaging the facts as all histories do, leaving out the
dead patches, artistically improving the sequence, hinting at which bits would
repay meditation and which are passage-work. But it would be wary of
sacrificing, in the name of the quintessentially methodical, any of the
benefits of the case-history.

On the subject of what didn't work we are all more articulate, though
still not obviously reliable -- and of course not much help constructively.

Expertology

There are (let us suppose) level-1 experts in some field.

Then at level 2 there are those who claim to be also experts at
transmitting their level-1 expertise -- but fewer of them, and the evidence to
justify the claim is a good deal less stringent than at level 1.

Then at level 3 there are those who claim to be also experts at the
transmission of expertise in general -- but fewer still, and with evidence even
less stringent. [This remark evidently claims to be level 3, or worse.]

As we go from level 1 to level 3, the need for expertise rises and its
reliability falls; painfully, in both cases. This is inevitable (and therefore
not in itself a scandal).

At level 1 some disciplines like to think they are `harder' than others; at
level 3 they're all in the same boat. That is, the `harder' they start, the
harder they must be prepared to fall. What they have in common is a need for
bi- or tri-lingualism -- the recognition that different ways of talking, and in
particular a wider range of degrees of asseveration, are needed where what we
say has different ceilings of reliability.

This may entail greater tensions for academics who take pride in a high ratio
of Understanding of basic concepts to `mere' know-how (at level 1). It isn't
easy to switch languages when one moves from a domain where
quantifiably-testable theory is supposed to be the sine qua non to others
where it is something else -- an ideal, a dream, or a constraint. Yet domains
exist where even `Basic Concept' isn't a basic concept -- that is, where such
talk can be a way of begging a question. (Come to think of it, how long
since we scrutinized the credentials of `Domain' ?)

Use of the word "expertise" leads, I fear inevitably, to a binary division of
the world into experts and non-experts, with only the former (in the opinion of
both sides) having what it takes to voice the Verdict of Science.

In a variant of this, not so different as may at first appear, there are
`scientific' experts who are sure to dis agree, and `generalist' experts
who can tell which set of `scientific' experts is the more reliable. Both
variants are static and divisive, the first assuming one, the latter two
unbridgeable gulfs.

Occasionally one comes across a different kind of expert -- so different as to
deserve a different name -- who has a lively awareness of both the
responsibilities and the temptations of expertise, and who tries to convey to
outsiders the more important `knowns' and the degree of confidence with which each of them is `known'. Talking in these terms would be easier if
there were a neutral term between Confidence and Unconfidence, and another
between Known and Unknown. For lack of these, even confessions of hesitation
must be expressed in the terminology of certainty.

Matching the degree of asseveration to the degree of understanding is a
Sisyphean task: on either side, the slope is steep to the exaggerations of
immodesty and over-modesty. No-one could be expected to stay on top all the
time; pity the teacher who cannot smile wryly as he starts back up.

Explaining

To help me see what he meant he struck a metaphorical match; not realizing how long it took to recover, both from the white dazzle it brought and the black
dazzle it left. Still, I'm grateful; though there wasn't quite time, between
the dazzles, to tell if we were looking in the same direction.

Too little explicitness leads to obscurity, which attracts the wrong readers.
Too much begins to sound like condescension, which repels the wanted readers.
Some is needed for stage-1 learning -- the push in the saddle that starts the
rider off. Too much prevents stage-2, self-pedalled learning.

Resolution: to stop presenting as if it answered all the questions an
explanation few of whose implications the hearers are yet in a position to
absorb; and so either antagonizing them (if they resent this sort of pressure)
or seducing them into pretending to understand. An explanation may be
presented quasi-autobiographically, as having provided the crucial stimulus
(but no more than the stimulus) which ultimately led, after further inputs
which there isn't time to enumerate, to the explainer's present fuller
understanding; but the temptation must always be strong to understate the
difference between immature and mature understanding, and to present the
explanation as constituting sufficient grounds for full understanding. I hope
I leave you with the feeling that you have in some sense 'understood' the above
explanation, inadequate though that sense may be.

Explanation is the autobiography of that subset of one's former perplexities
which the hearer is still struggling with. How could one explain what one had
never been puzzled by, or to one who sees no puzzle?

An educational system earns its keep if it does nothing more than maintain the
right meaning of (what counts officially as) Explanation. It isn't that hard,
if you repeat often enough mantras of the form: `This (form of words A) is
explained by that (form of words B)' or `A, because B'. It would be worth
totting up the frequency of such phrases, compared with that of less
simple-minded schemata, in a random manual; but in order not to cause needless offence we should pick one that is now amusingly out-of-date, from say fifteen or twenty years ago. (`Maintain' here has the engineering sense, which extends to a little debugging, provided it is done discreetly.)

Isaac Todhunter: "`Sir,' said Todhunter to Clerk Maxwell, `If a young man will not believe his Tutor, a gentleman and often in Holy Orders, I fail to see what can be gained by a practical demonstration.'"

George Eliot: "But let the wise be warned against too great readiness at
explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for
reckoners to go wrong."

Expounding

From the lectern, my exposition looked like the M1; from the hall, like
Spaghetti Junction.

Expounding is heavy work. At every point there is a choice of lines, for every
line a choice of words, all of which, though at first reasonable candidates,
turn out to have snags. We earn our keep by knowing a snag when we see one, by
our cunning at devising a way round it, by our readiness to acknowledge
(notwithstanding that investment of cunning) a further or worse snag in the
hard-won solution, and in general by our stamina at this unending game.

Between the classical theory and my annual exposition of it there is an
embarrassingly obvious chasm. Only one of them is in print, and so open to
scrutiny from all comers. The printed text may try to sound authoritative, and
the oral exposition of it may try not to; but it is the former which invites
criticism on the fairest terms.

Exposition-1 offers itself as an improvement on the original, or doesn't do
enough to stop being taken as one. Exposition-2 offers itself as a
better-than-nothing substitute for the original, or doesn't do enough to stop
itself being taken as one. Exposition-3 says `The only point of this
is to be tested against the original, line by line', but disclaims
responsibility for ensuring that a realistic amount of time is left free for
this (and even for estimating how much time that would need). Exposition-4 is a scattergun mixture of all the others, hitting assorted targets in proportions
it considers unknowable and unimprovable.

Eye-contact

Kleist: "It is strangely inspiring to speak to someone directly facing us; a
glance which proclaims that our half-expressed thought has already been grasped often gives us the expression for the whole other half. I believe that many a great speaker did not yet know at the moment that he opened his mouth what he was going to say. But the conviction that the profusion of ideas that he needed could be drawn from the situation and from the resulting stimulation of his mind made him bold enough to begin, trusting to luck."